If you have ever read Truman Capote (and if you have not, dear reader, why?), you know that he has produced some of the most perfectly calibrated sentences in the English language. Whether he sounded them out in his head, simply knew the music of words better than the rest of us, or learned everything he knew from Harper Lee, who is to say. The story might clunk here and there, but the words on the page always sang.

Capote knew that rhythm mattered, almost more than anything else. In 1957, he talked about style and control to The Paris Review:

Call it precious and go to hell, but I believe a story can be wrecked by a faulty rhythm in a sentence—especially if it occurs toward the end—or a mistake in paragraphing, even punctuation. Henry James is the maestro of the semicolon. Hemingway is a first-rate paragrapher. From the point of view of ear, Virginia Woolf never wrote a bad sentence. I don’t mean to imply that I successfully practice what I preach. I try, that’s all…